if the colt captures the belmont, chrome will be the first triple crown winner since 1978. the "usa today" is reporting there is a chance chrome's owners might not let him run fess not allowed to use a special breathing strip. all right. a woman's incurable cancer is now in remission. doctors say it's thanks to a huge dose of a virus. we'll ask her about her amazing recovery live in the 2:00 eastern hour of the newsroom today. i'm fredricka whitfield. fareed zakaria "gps" starts right now. this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. we will start today's show with timothy geithner, the former secretary of the treasury, who is finally talking. why did he bail out the same banks that many blame for causing the global financial

crisis? i will ask him. and drones. the united states still uses them in many places around the world, but now it seems everybody has a drone. former terror official, richard clark, on the frightening future of the robotic killing machines. also, in the internet age, is there something you wish you could hide? well, you're in luck, at least if you live in the european union. i'll explain and tell you about the conflict with freedom of speech. and is china becoming more nationalist, more capitalist, more democratic? what do the people of china really want? kevin osnose of "the new yorker" tells us. but first here's my take. president obama's pivot to asia has been widely praised,

but many critics wished that he would infuse the policy with greater substance and energy. in fact, the administration has the opportunity to fill in one of the great missing pieces of that policy, a strategic relationship with the continent's second largest country, india, once a new government is formed in new delhi. but it will require both countries to make some major changes. the united states has to clear the air with the person who will be india's next prime minister, narenda modi. modi has been shunned by u.s. officials for a decade. the george w. bush administration put him on a black list of sorts and denied him a visa to come to america. the visa issue is now irrelevant, because as head, he automatically gets a special

visa. but the obama administration should go further and move to strengthen ties with him. the cold shoulder should be replaced with a warm embrace. first, a few words to explain the blacklist and why, in my view, putting modi on it was arbitrary and excessive. modi is a hinduist part of the national government, at least until he becomes prime minister, he is head of the government in the state of goodraw. he held that job in 2002 when fierce risings between hindus and muslims broke out. in that capacity, he encouraged or did nothing to stop vigilante violence against muslims and police complicit with these riots. in those riots, 1,000 people, almost all muslims, died. those accused of killing muslims have been minimal. it is a dark episode in india's history, and modi comes out of it tainted as the head of the state government at the time. but his own role does remain unclear. three indian investigations have

cleared him of specific culpability, those these investigations have been criticized by human rights groups with credible concerns. here's the part that bothers me. modi is the only individual ever to have been denied a visa for religious freedom, which makes the bush administration's decision look utterly arbitrary. why modi and not the prime minister of iraq, nouri al malaki? he heads a government that is deeply sectarian, has been accused of involvement with death squads and reprisal killings and is certainly involved in the systematic persecution of sunnis in his country. yet far from being shunned, malaki has been received in washington as an honored guest by two different administrations, the religious freedom, the very body that has seeked modi out, list countries of particular concern for their

oppression of religious minorities, chief among them, saudi arabia, pakistan and iraq. not a single government official from any of these countries has ever been placed on a blacklist or denied a visa. when human rights issues are used in a blatantly selective manner, they rightly invite charges of hypocrisy. if the united states can shift its attitude towards mr. modi, modi can get over his problems with america. he will have to shift his posture on several issues. for several years now, india has been adrift. new delhi has been punching below its weight, so much so that the country has almost disappeared as a serious player in the region and the world. torn between its own anti-colonial postures and the reality of a rising china, india has been stuck. it has shied away from the kind of robust relationship with the united states that would help it

economically, militarily and politically. if the united states and india, two of the world's oldest and largest democracies, could create an urban partnership, it would be best for the cause for democracy and human rights around the world. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. and let's get started. january 27, 2009. the united states was suffering from the worst financial crisis since the great depression. and timothy geithner had just

embarked on his first full day as secretary of the treasury. he boldly told president obama that they still had five financial bombs to defuse. lehman had exploded but fannie, freddie, aig, citigroup and bank of america was still ticking and in deep trouble, and they were bigger than lehman. the financial system as a whole was at risk of collapse. the question was, how to stop it. geithner recounts the extraordinary events in his new book "stress test: reflections on financial crises." it is part self-deprecating memoir and part decision to bail out the banks in 2009. we sat down to talk about it all. tim geithner, welcome. >> nice to see you. >> so, one of the things that will surprise people about this book is to learn some of the details about you, because you're sort of one of these blank slates under which people have projected whatever they wanted. >> some hopes and some fears. >> geithner, the self-proclaimed backstage guy served as president of the new york federal reserve from 2003 to

2009, during the bush administration and the beginning of the obama white house. before that, geithner worked at the treasury department and the imf. and unless you count a brief stint at henry kissinger's consulting firm, geithner never worked in the private sector. yet the rumors persisted, he was one of them, a banker. he's even been misidentified as a goldman sachs' alum. >> almost everyone thought you were a banker when you have, in fact, never worked in a bank in your life. but i think most people knew you were a republican. >> i was. i wouldn't say an active political republican, but when i came out of college at that time, i was definitely somewhat at the conservative end, certainly on economic policy. and i guess on foreign policy issues, too. i was sort of in the realist tradition of foreign policy. >> and did you feel like the world changed, did you change, or did you just go into treasury as an impartial civil servant? >> i definitely went in as sort

of a non-political civil servant, definitely. and i think mostly what happened is the american politics changed, and so much of the conservative movement moved very far to the right. and so over time, i felt more comfortable in the approach to policy that president clinton and president obama embraced. >> you were not, you know, the star student. you weren't even particularly good at economics, though you did well. what do you think explains your trajectory, your success? >> i'm sure it's inexplicable. i grew up overseas. it's an interesting way to watch your country and learn about your country looking at it from outside, and i could see the huge effect america had on the world, mostly for goods sometimes. sometimes not so much. and i wanted to have a chance to play a role in affecting the choices america made and that's what drew me in to public life, but i didn't go in, you know, as a banker, economist or lawyer in

the classic ways. >> he also went against convention when he interviewed for the job as treasury secretary. he says he urged then-senator obama not to choose him. his mentor, robert rubin, the treasury secretary under president clinton, spoke to obama. >> robert rubin told the president that you were inarticulate. and in his job interview, the president says to you, rubin says you're in articulate. what do you have to say about this? and you say, "he's right and it's worse than you think." >> it was. it was. i didn't ever have high expectations that there was a way to make what was necessary understandable. >> geithner felt he did not have a reassuring presence, something the country needed from the person in charge of its finances. he was president of the new york fed when lehman brothers collapsed. he was a political albatross, geithner told obama. there were better people for the job. while he ultimately took the job, it didn't take long for geithner to feel conflicted.

on his third full day as secretary, he was walking into his first one-on-one meeting with the president when a democratic operative stopped him, handing him talking points and told him he was going to denounce him to the press. >> and you said, i'm not saying any of this, so the president said what he was going to say, and as you say, you watched uncomfortably. why were you uncomfortable about criticizing executive in competence? >> i did criticize it. at that point, i felt like my job was to get the economy growing again and make sure we had finances in place to make that happen instead of continuing to crush the economy. i felt that was my principal responsibility, and i wasn't going to be able to help much in trying to ease the understandable public anger because of the tragic damage of the crisis. i was sitting next to the

president of the united states, a very talented order, and i felt like he would be better doing that than me. >> in the end, geithner suggests that he was never able to make the case and lost the american public. >> do you feel like people will never understand this, that you're stuck with this image of having been the guy who bailed out the banks? >> i don't know that you can ever change that perspective, because the core of what you need to do in this context is just going to be -- is going to look unfair, and how can you convince people it could have been worse? americans had no memory of the great depression. it's hard to -- barney franks said once it's hard to run on the platform that things could have been worse, hard to convince people. so those two things make it hard. the reason i wrote this book is because i thought it would be fair to give people a better feel for why we made the choices we made, and they don't necessarily need to agree with us. >> up next, why geithner and his boss, president obama, felt that baling out the bankers was the right thing to do. of complete darkness.

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with brand-new versions. we put members first. join the nation. ♪ nationwide is on your side ♪ and we are back with more of my conversation with former treasury secretary tim geithner. so the strategy that you adopted has often been criticized, it was criticized at the time and it's criticized in retrospect as bailing out wall street at the expense of main street. what do you say? >> it's a common perception, and it's a completely understandable perception, because what you have to do to protect the economy, the country, the average person running a business or just trying to keep

their job in a classic financial panic feels deeply unfair. it's counterintuitive. and that's because the central parallel then is making sure you prevent the collapse. think of the banking system as the power grid. it's like a vital, essential thing. and what you saw in the great depression and you saw in countries since then is that if you let panic escalate and that fire burn too strong, it's devastating. you know, unemployment in the great depression went to 25%. it fell by 25%. it took like a decade to begin the heal the damage. so the counterintuitive thing, what feels realy unfair but what was essential in a classic panic is you had to act incredibly aggressive to make sure you helped prevent that loss of damage to the power grid. >> geithner understands the

outrage to the moral fundamentalists, as he calls them. some even wanted old testament vengeance to the bankers who set the financial fire in 2008. according to some, the arsonists got bailouts, but geithner says don't mistake this as sympathy toward the bankers. >> we didn't do it because we had any interest in protecting people on wall street for the errors of their mistakes, we did it because it was the only way we could protect the average person from mass unemployment. >> still, geithner acknowledges that a conflicted obama administration never mastered the politics, never learned to adeptly navigate the populist anger. and if the american public felt washington was coddling wall street, geithner knew he was seen as the coddler in chief. geithner told the president he didn't think they could stop aig

from paying out $150 million in bonuses after they had rescued the insurance giant from bankruptcy. someone like elizabeth warren says that if you look at the great depression, they were much tougher on banks and on creditors in general. understanding you had to save the financial system, you could have been tougher on the banks. >> i have a lot of respect for her and i listened to that perspective, but i think it's a deeply mistaken perspective on what it takes in a crisis. and you wouldn't want to go back and listen to the great depression and try to replicate that outcome for the average person. what we did is try to go directly into the economy to limit the tax cuts and unemployment benefits. the scale of what we did was relative to what roosevelt did, in those terms.

great credit to the president. that was massive in its overall capacity. ultimately, we would have liked it to be sustained longer and larger, but in the beginning it was larger than what roosevelt did in relative terms exactly for the reasons anybody would want. >> larger than what fdr did, but large enough? geithner wrote that it sometimes felt like they were fighting world war iii with general washington's army. and yet, geithner says, the united states is almost on the road to recovery. >> i think it's a much stronger economy today, even than it was in the crisis, because it was a bubbling, frothy economy at that point. and i think in many ways, the basic productive capacity in the american economy are intact and very strong today. >> so critics would argue that this is the weakest recovery since the great depression, so in 60 or 70 years, that much of that weakness has to do with what the wall street journal editorializes often, because of all the burdens that the obama

administration put on it, regulatory burdens, dodd-frank, what do you say to them? >> we definitely brought some substantial changes to the economics of the financial system. and those were disruptive, and they definitely changed the economics. but that was a necessary and just thing to do. if you look at the american economy today, you're going to see it gradually strengthen the economy, and we should see not just unemployment fall further, but we should see income growth improve for a broader faction of americans. and that's, again, i believe because we adopted a dramatically different strategy to our crisis that had been the pattern of governments, really, across decades and decades. >> as for his own legacy, that will likely be judged on how the new post-crisis system, the one he helped create, withstands the next crisis. for now, geithner, who left public office in 2013, is president of warburg pinkess, a private equity firm. as to what his future holds beyond that? well, he's pretty clear of what

he doesn't want to do. you're out of the spotlight. if the fed job came up six years from now, would you take it? >> oh, i think i've had my time in public life. i mean, i used to tell the president we're a nation of 3 million people -- >> 300 million people. >> 300 million people. excuse me. and i feel like i've had my share of consequential jobs in public life. >> tim geithner, glad to have you. >> nice to see you. >> the public may not be completely out of the woods yet, but keep in mind the united states financial system has recovered better than europe's, for instance. unemployment in the eurozone still hovers around 12%. that's higher than at the peak of the american recession. as for that unpopular federal bailout, it turns out that u.s. taxpayers have actually made a $30 billion profit, according to a propublica estimate. geithner has suffered some

political damage, but billionaire investor warren buffett calls him one of the heroes of the economic pearl harbor that was the financial crisis. next on "gps," have you ever wanted to erase parts of your past? well, a court in europe has just granted permission for people to do just that, to the delight of some and the horror of others. i'll explain. berkshire hathaway home services. good to know. but when we put something in the ground, feed it, and care for it, don't we grow something more? we grow big celebrations, and personal victories. we grow new beginnings, and better endings. grand gestures, and perfect quiet. we grow escape, bragging rights, happier happy hours. so let's gro something greater with miracle-gro. what will you grow?

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comcast business built for business. now for our "what in the world" segment. do you have something in your past that you would rather forget -- [ sirens ] a youthful indiscretion that led to a run-in with the police, perhaps? a debt that you forgot to pay, maybe? how about a quickie marriage one night in vegas that ended in a quickie divorce? in the internet age, these are the types of things that can now live forever. except, perhaps, if you live in the european union. let me explain. this week the eu's highest court decided that parts of your past have a right to be forgotten on court decided that parts of your past have a right to be forgotten on court decided that parts of your past have a right to be forgotten on the internet. it is a ruling that effectively

censors things on google. here's how it happened. a man sued google because a search on google of his name turned up articles that mentioned his debts from 1996. he argued that this infringed on both his dignity and his privacy. on tuesday, the luxembourg-based department of justice agreed. they have to stop linking people, they said. under the right to be forgotten principle, if you live in one of the eu's 20-member states, you will be able to remove links to your past. you have to meet the bar that the court set, that the information is inadequate, irrelevant or outdated. rules are different if you are a public figure or if the information is in the public interest. the landmark announcement has pleased privacy activists, but it has left critics reeling that

it is a violation of free speech. as for google, it found the ruling disappointing and is analyzing its implications. it could be very expensive for internet companies. for now, it mostly affects just google. the search engine accounts for 90% of web searches in the european union. how it will all work in practice is still to be ironed out. "the wall street journal" has received requestsrequests, acco google, from a politician wanting to remove articles about his behavior in office and from a doctor seeking to delete on-line reviews. another aspect of this to consider, we have edward snowden to thank for this in similar rulings. the eu is currently overhauling its data protection laws, inspired partly by snowden's revelations of america's extensive electronic spine program. the real problem here is this. the culling of information likely cannot all be done by humans. remember, google executes nearly 12 billion searches a month, and can an algorithm really find the

delicate balance between personal privacy and the public interest between what's convenient and what's inaccurate? i would think not. now, european courts have historically favored privacy rights while american courts hold the country sacrosanct, but 86% of americans have taken measures to mask their digital footprints, according to the pugh research center. so we will have to come up with some rules on the road to make people feel secure about their privacy, but let's make sure we don't undermine and erode the things that have made the internet such an amazing, transforming feature of modern life, its universality and its openness. we'll link to this segment on our website. if you are on the eu, please do not request to have it deleted.

next on "gps," look up. it is a bird, it's a plane. no, it's a drone. the somewhat scary and ubiquitous future of drones, when we come back. i love to eat. i love hanging out with my friends. i have a great fit with my dentures. i love kiwis. i've always had that issue with the seeds getting under my denture. super poligrip free -- it creates a seal of the dentures in my mouth. even well-fitting dentures let in food particles. super poligrip is zinc free. with just a few dabs, it's clinically proven to seal out more food particles so you're more comfortable and confident while you eat. super poligrip free made the kiwi an enjoyable experience.

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a week ago today, the supreme leader of iran, ayatollah khamenei, had an appropriate meeting with a drone. they had copied that american drone that crashed in iran in 2011 and an official iranian news report said the new drones would be able to attack u.s. warships. whether iran is bluffing or not remains in question. but the future of drones is quite well. it is the subject of a book of well-known terror official, richard a. clarke. he joins me to talk about the present and future of these killing machines. richard clarke, pleasure to have you on. >> good to be here. >> so your book as a central aspect, a drone strike, and then the sense of vengeance that one of the people who was associated with it, one of the targets who

survives, ends up having. it raises this fundamental question that we deal with in yemen and pakistan and afghanistan. are the drone strikes worth it? or is the sense of rage, outrage, the collateral casualties, does that all outweigh the benefit of getting this one guy? >> we began the drone program to get one guy, bin laden. that didn't work. but the idea was to have a very restricted list of very senior people. and it did kind of work for that. and we had nothing else that worked. so if you put yourself into the mind of the counterterrorism official in the novel, or in reality, the counterterrorism official feels the weight of the world on his or her shoulders. they have to stop the next attack. they have to save the lives of americans. and they look at their quiver and there are very few arrows that work.

and the drones did. so there begins to be a seduction, an addiction. did that work? well, it worked to kill him. let's do it some more. well, maybe we should broaden the definition of who we're going to kill. then you end up, as we are today, having killed probably 2500 people in five countries. and they all have friend. they all have family. they all have tribe. and when a program gets that big, it also becomes a phenomenon in and of itself. and so you get protests in the street about the drone program. >> you raise another issue in the book which, again, seems to me, part of a very interesting real-life discussion. the whole book is like that, but one that struck me, in your version, the terrorist organizations are becoming drug cartels and the drug cartels are becoming terrorist organizations that, you know, partly began as

a necessary way of financing because the u.s. and other allies have essentially cut off terrorist financing so effectively, the only way to make money is to go into the drug trade, poppy in afghanistan. how real is that? >> that's very real, and it's hezbollah as well. and it's gangs and cartels and tribes in afghanistan and pakistan that affiliate with the taliban and in al qaeda. they're making hundreds of millions of dollars and stashing it in dubai and other places. so it's both terrorists financing themselves and drug cartels engaging in associations with terrorists. >> you talk about the fact that this technology is going to be more widely available, and so we better be careful. give us a sense. we've heard this for a while. how close are we to china in significant ways using drones? >> china is using drones today, they're just not killing people with them.

they have a drone that looks remarkably like the predator, and i suspect it's probably based on the predator drawings that they hacked and stole, as they do so often. there are probably 40 nations now that have drones. three that i know of have used them in lethal operations. >> so these are armed drones now? >> there so there are three countries that have used armed drones, russia, united states and israel. there are 40-something countries that have drones that could easily put weapons on them. and now there are companies and local governments, and in the united states, it's become a real issue, because there are thousands of people who have bought drones and want to use them for real estate purposes and advertising purposes, and the government rules says you can't fly above 400 feet.

but one did in florida and almost hit an airliner. we're going to see drones as more and more part of our everyday life as we go forward. >> so we clearly need rules about surveillance drones, and that's a national issue, my guess is, but at an international level, do you think we could come up with some kind of international treaty that sets out exactly what the rights and responsibilities are? otherwise, as you point out, we have killed 2,500 people in five countries without any kind of progressional declaration of war, without even the indication of some kind of presidential war power. >> well, if we establish some international norm and said, you can do this but you can't do that. if we were the leader of that effort, it would be rather ironic because we would be the only ones that violated those international norms. >> mr. clarke, pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. next on "gps," just who are the chinese and what are their ambitions? that nation of 300 billion people is certainly not monolithic. we will take you inside china

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the communist party? are they poor farmers or rich businesspeople with very few in between? and are they always really good at math? of course not, but my next guest, evan ausmus, goes much deeper into who today's chinese really are, what their dreams are. it's his new book "age of ambition, chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china." he's now based in washington for the same magazine. evan, you say it's easy to understand china if you can imagine the gilded age in china? >> it's true. if you make a comparison to the united states experience, we're living in america through 1990. think about it. we were coming out of the civil war, which in china's case means the french revolution, putting the country back together again. we laid railroad tracks in the united states. china has built more high-speed rail than the united states combined.

there's this incredible sense of what's possible. it means you're generating huge amounts of wealth and it's going into some people's hands and not into others. >> the real story of your book is the rise of chinese individualism, right? >> that's right. what interested me most was the china i had always studied, for instance, in the united states and when i went over there, everything i read was about these broad strokes, about economic change and the police forces, about one-fifth of humanity and what was happening to them. and when you got on to the ground, you discovered that people had the most private, intimate, perceptual changes in their lives that really mattered to them. >> the way they're trying to change and individualize themselves is by getting rich. >> there's been this interesting progression. the first thing people wanted to do was get rich. that's the most basic human instinct when people have lived in poverty.

as they got settled, they needed to know who was setting the rules. they needed to know about politics and policy, and that kind of set off a search for information. that's why you've seen this incredible investigation agency over the last 20 years. there are great journalists doing work on the web. >> people think of china as a closed society with a closed media, but you point actually, as long as you're not talking kind of talking about high politics, which is the legitimacy of the communist party, there is a lot of journalism going on in china. >> there is a huge amount of journalism going on. i wrote about a woman named hu shu li, and when she began, she learned there was this huge story about chinese economy, who was winning and who was losing. and she discovered that if she wrote it just right, she could get away with it. she was hitting edge ball. it's like hitting the ping-pong ball on the table and getting the points without missing the table entirely. that's transformative. you see people that can get away

with it this much without getting into trouble. >> one thing i'm struck by the chinese when i go there, episodic and urban experiences by and large, is how materialistic the culture has become. how individualistic it is, how, materialistic, how obsessed with western brands. i say if you go to the national museum in beijing, you'll only see mostly tourists, but if you go to the louis vuitton store, it's all chinese. is there a feeling that maybe we've overdosed on materialism? >> there is. there's been a remarkable shift over the last few years. when you sit around the dinner table with successful chinese middle class strivers five years ago, for instance, everyone wanted to talk about real estate or travel, where they were going. today, they want to talk about who is your guru, who are you reading about these days? who are you pursing? there are these bigger questions, deeper questions.

in the book, i call it the quest for faith. in china today, there are as many christians as there are members of the communist party. there is this enormous sense >> what does all this leave you thinking about china, the chinese. in america we guest interested in countries only if we get scared. the devil's dictionary says war is god's way of teaching americans geography. when you look at china, do you say to americans this is a country that is more worrying, scarier, different, what? >> what i'm most struck be by is there a gap between what's going on at the elite political level were the conversation when the united states and china which after all is getting tense. it's about the possibility of conflict for instance over

territory. if you get on to the ground and you move into a chinese neighborhood and you live there for a long time, you talk to people. you find out that the things they talk about are similar to the things we talk about in the united states, the gap in opportunity, the ability to education your children. and what's amazing is how similar our lives and the ones in china are becoming. so my goal ultimately, one of reasons i've lived there so long is to try to help people understand what it meals like to be chinese because i's not as foreign as you might think. >> in order to do that you have to read this book. thank you so much. up next, what is the least anti-semantic place in the east. we'll tell you on the other side of the break. peace of mind is important when you're running a successful business.

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the anti-defamation league released results this week of a ground breaking study that asked respondents in more than 100 countries about their views of jews and judaism. it estimated that 26% harbor

anti-semantic views. in the middle east and north africa, that number was more like 74% that that brings me to the question of the weem. what is the least anti-semantic place in the middle east. a, the palestinian territories, b, jordan wx c iran, d egypt. stay tuned and we'll tell you the answer. this book of the week is "stress test, reelection flexions on financial crisis." it is surprising he frank and well-written, all in all the most intelligent defense of the obama administration's handling of the crisis. and now for the last look. here at gps we love deep data dives. we also revel in the fact that america continues to be the melting pot that it has always been. so we were interested to see a pieces on slate.com this week

analyzing the most common languages spoken in each state using u.s. census data. this first map is predictable. other than english, spanish is the most spoken language in all u.s. states. but watch what happens when you remove spanish from the equation. there is the melting pot. in michigan arabic clocks in as the third most commonly spoken language, in minnesota it's hmong, texas, oklahoma and washington, it's a philippine no language in hawaii, california and nevada. in four states it's native american languages, it's french in 11 states and in 16 states it's german. if you're surprised at that number, according to recent census numbers, people of german heritage outnumber all other groups in the united states, even irish. until the first warld war war by

some accounts, ger than was the second most widely spoken language in the united states and that tradition lingers, i suppose. we have a link on our website to the slate article. the correct answer to our gps challenge question was c, iran was the least anti-semantic country in the middle east and north africa. it's 56% anti-semantic but the least of all the rest. the palestinian territories were the most in the area and the world come in at 93%. a close second, iraq at 92%. as for the least anti-semantic country in the world, apparent lit it is laus. if you haven't had enough of me, i will be on john oliver's great new show "last week tonight" on hbo airing sunday here in the united states.

tune in. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. hello, everyone. these are the stories topping our news this hour. a big shakeup in the cable industry and it will affect tens of millions of you. hear which company at&t is about to acquire and how that merger could impact your view options. fierce fires raging in southern california may have met their match. the army of firefighter on the front line we'll take you high above the flames where military choppers are doing battle. and a minnesota woman with incurable cancer is now in remission after getting a mega dose of the measles virus. we'll talk to her live and hear what the doctors are saying about the implications of her remarkable rebound. a huge merger is in the

works today and it could involve your cable provider. te telecome giant is expected to finalize a deal to akwar directv, according to a source who knows about the meeting. and if it goes through, that deal will be worth about $50 billion. att and directv are both staying quiet on this for now. but sources say the announcement could come as early as this afternoon. so cable customers are wondering how does this affect me? to answer that i'm joined by economic analyst, stephen moore. stephen how is this going to impact customers who may have directive or at and t? >> this is one of many mergers that are going on in the telecom industry right now. many people get their telephone service from at&t and there are millions of people who are direct